


Falsification

by Trixxster103



Series: The Boy With Pink Hair -verse [2]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: 5 + 1 Fic, Angst, Bisexual Lars, Character Death, Drabbles, F/M, Future Fic, Lies, M/M, mostly sad, non-explicit mentions of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-26 15:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13238781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixxster103/pseuds/Trixxster103
Summary: The five times that Lars lies to Steven and the one time that Steven lies to Lars.Drabbles of 100 - 500 words.Has a few references to my other fic, The Boy With Pink Hair and takes place in the same universe, but that fic is in no way necessary to read to understand this fic.





	1. Line

Space is big. Really big. Bigger than Lars expects. And so, between dogfights, and piracy and gem politics there is actually a lot of empty space. Which means empty time for thinking. Think Lars does.

In his thinking Lars begins to plan and categorize and really look inward at himself. For a long time his body doesn’t change while his mind chrysalises and emerges better and more beautiful than ever before.

A line, clear and perfect forms in his head: before death and after death. Lars knows so clearly that it is up to him what happens on the other side of the line, where he goes and what he does. When he gets to Steven in his mind, he decides then and there to stop lying to the boy. The line has another meaning then: lies and truth.

Before the line is one big lie, his whole damn life pretending to be something and someone he wasn’t. After is his truth, living and being it, embracing everything he is fully, without care of other people’s opinions. It’s liberating.

That lie, the one from 'before', will be his first he decides, because it’s the easiest – mark the only – way to forgive himself for all of it and start fresh. Lars vows to keep the tally at one.

And for a time he does.


	2. Home

Lars is almost disappointed in himself for how quickly he breaks his vow. But it isn’t difficult to forgive himself: Steven needs his lie before he breaks into a million pieces.

The boy is tired and small, and so light on his back as Lars runs; he can’t believe he’s almost fifteen years old.

He runs, and runs, until his feet feel bloody and lungs shredded with glass, whispering to the boy all the while, adding to his count, hoping that he can consider many small lies as just one big one instead.

“We’ll be okay. Homeworld won’t get us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to try and work within the constraint of exactly 100 hundred words. So here it is, no more, no less. Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!


	3. Hate

When puberty hits Steven like a truck, Lars’ body betrays him. He’s been serious about Sadie for less than a year at that point, but is already in deep. Truth is a valuable fine edged weapon that they eagerly turn on each other. Lars is pretty sure he loves her, and wants no one else.

But then Steven appears one day taller than him, with stubble on his face and muscled and sweaty, and Lars has to duck away and change his underwear before anyone can see his blushing face and shaky limbs. 

And then after-puberty Stevonnie happens. Sadie agrees to a break, until they figure things out.

When Steven asks what’s wrong, Lars breaks and tells him. Steven is the first of many coming outs. “I’m bi!” But then he panics, crying and shaking in Steven’s kind embrace when he asks him who he’s bi for after Lars explains the break from Sadie. Eventually he blurts out Peedee’s name.

The next day, horribly, Steven brings them both together in a little café in the city as a surprise. Peedee is unamused.

“I hate you.”

And Lars almost cries from relief. “Well fuck you too, Peedee.”

“Eww, that’s exactly what I’m not going to do.”

Peedee is Lars’ second coming out. They keep it a secret from Steven, pretending to go on a few more dates, and then quietly ‘break up’, while actually becoming not friends, but not exactly enemies either. Their dynamic stays because Lars enjoys it, enjoys that he doesn’t have to lie to Peedee.

Every night he goes to bed sick and guilty, first for enjoying antagonizing Peedee and then for lying to Steven. 

Slowly, it gets better.

Lars and Sadie get back together, realizing that they aren’t going to solve the problem alone. Lars learns what real, all consuming love is when Sadie doesn’t even flinch when he admits to her that he fantasized about Steven again – the fifth time ever. He doesn’t blink when she admits the same thing about Stevonnie.

The lust Lars feels withers and dies, leaving something different, but stronger underneath. It was always going to be fleeting Lars realizes, just his body reacting to new stimuli. The thought of sex with Steven becomes, if not repulsive, then merely uncomfortable, when Lars realizes that Steven has become a brother to him. And Sadie realizes it was never their body that she had wanted, but the blazing confidence and pride of Stevonnie.

Lars never reveals the crush to Steven, and year after year falls more deeply in love with Sadie, as she does in turn with him. In his quiet secret place, which not even she knows about, he tallies the crush as lie number three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I definitely headcanon Lars as confused bisexual. Him and Peedee have an interesting relationship for sure.


	4. Conception

Lars’ fourth lie slips out of his mouth while he’s holding Steven’s first child, one month old and swaddled in a soft green blanket, eyes huge and already adoring of her Uncle Lars. Since Connie wanted to wait until things were settled, Steven is twenty-seven, meaning Lars is technically thirty, though his body is still the same as ever. Inside he feels old, and the child – Rosaline – becomes almost too heavy to bear. She is fragile and beautiful and deserves so much better of an uncle.

“So when are you and Sadie going to have your own?” Steven jokes past his exhaustion; Rosaline is colicky with every human barring Lars and Greg.

Lars wants to vomit, sorrow twisting heavy in his gut, but that would be rude to the child in his arms, so he grins and bears it, swallowing hard to lightly reply around a perfectly faked laugh. “Neither Sadie and I really want kids, y’know? I mean we’ve got Rosaline, and you to take care of.”

Steven completely misses the hidden sorrow in Lars’ voice, replying to his teasing with pretend indignation. They fall into familiar banter, and it isn’t brought up again.

It almost hurts how respectful Steven is of Lar’s so called ‘choice’, as he never once belittles or tries to change his mind otherwise, unlike many of his human friends.

Only Sadie, their parents and a few doctors know the truth.

 

“You can be frank, Dr. Maheswaran. You can even be crude. Just be quick.”

“To put it simply, Lars: you’re firing blanks. The moment sperm leaves your body it dies. Probably due to your – uh,”

“My zombification.”

 

Dr. Maheswaran has called in exactly three favors in her life: once when her daughter was born, the second when her husband lost his leg in the gem war, and the third, when Lars and Sadie, distraught and frustrated and sorely needing a voice of experience and wisdom appeared on her doorstep. Lars is eternally grateful to her and the specialist doctor she finds and swears to secrecy.

Sadie cries for a month. Lars cries for two. Eventually they discuss donation and adoption, but Lars knows they are not options. Like the gems, like Steven, he is not a human, and so the government considers it easier to pretend he doesn’t exist.

They mourn the child they will never have. Year on year it gets easier, but it never goes away, especially as Rosaline gets older. But they never grow bitter.

Lars never tells Steven the truth either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Definite headcanon that Lars can't have children now that he's a pink zombie. =(


	5. Death

When the fifth, final lie comes, it’s been so long that Lars’ secret place where he tallied the other four is long gone, and they exist only as sharp burning memories in his head. Steven is six thousand, three hundred and seventy-two years old, only looking middle aged, but Lars is certain he feels ancient that day.

The ceremony had been brief, and without much human tradition, which is how she would’ve wanted it. They never got the chance to bury Rose, but Steven thinks Pearl might like to be near her, and near her friends, so he carries her, heavier than anything else he’s ever held and buries the dead lifeless gem in a soft patch of ground at the Strawberry Battlefield. There is no tombstone, but he drives her favorite sword into the ground near it, as a makeshift marker.

With nothing else to give, Lars celebrates their long, close friendship by bringing baked goods to the field that day – and every year after – and scattering them about, feeding the birds and the wild life. Neither of them liked eating, but both took joy in feeding others. He knows she would’ve done the same for him.

Even through their grief there is pride – Pearl raged against death. She did not go gently or quietly, and Lars can no longer read any Dylan Thomas, his very name sparking memory of the poem that had been Pearl’s hope and inspiration at the end of her life, a poem Lars had introduced her to.

They – the three of them – were doing a puzzle when the first tremors of things to come rippled through their family. Pearl collapses. When she comes to she is pale and knowing. The oldest gem in existence, bar the diamonds, who were either shattered or had ran away, simply because no one had survived longer than her. The rest had fallen to the war or diamond’s whim long ago.

Time is like water on rocks to a gem, Pearl explains cryptically. Eventually Lars rationalizes it as ‘All things die. Period.’ Even light wasn’t immortal.

Pearl knows she is going to die, but fights it valiantly, researching, experimenting, growing weaker by the day until she fades away in Steven’s arms, warm, safe and surrounded by everyone who loved her.

“She’s in Heaven, now, you know. With Rose and Greg, and Sheena, and all her friends. She’s gonna wait for you and welcome you, too.” Lars offers the lie umprompted. It is comfortable and easy as it slips out of his mouth, making him almost believe it himself. Steven accepts it without reservation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another headcanon I had, that gems can die naturally, just after a really long time, and no gem has gotten the chance to live that long because of accidental death, shattering via the diamonds, the war etc. I also totally see Lars and Pearl becoming friends. The is 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', by Dylan Thomas for those who were wondering. Anyways thanks for reading, let me know what you think!


	6. End

Eventually Lars stops keeping track of the years. He knows Steven is eleven thousand and something or other and that makes him eleven thousand something or other and three. The world has changed, so has the universe. They live in space full time. Things are almost more different than Lars can comprehend.

Time has become meaningless, centuries slipping by without care.

Still his body remains exactly the same as when Steven brought him back from the dead. Sometimes he thinks it would have been better if he had died, a liar and a loser, that day on Homeworld. Ain’t no rest for the wicked. None for the good, either.

Garnet is deteriorating. Often she is confused or in a haze, lost in the future, slipping through a thousand streams of time. She no longer knows when she is. Just as often she becomes lost in the past, calling out and searching for Rose or Pearl. Lars suspects she might be the next to go, considering Ruby and Sapphire are the next eldest gems.

Amethyst is preparing to run away again, and Lars can hardly blame her. He wishes sometimes that he could run too. He only wonders how long she will be gone this time. The day after Lars told his fifth lie she disappeared for nearly five hundred years.

Steven is old too, hair gone white, body weakening. He’s still stronger than any human because of his gem half, but it is so obvious that he is tired, and he is old. Often he takes Lars’ arm, looking for a steady hand but refusing to admit he needs a cane.

They don’t count the years, but Steven remembers and celebrates every birthday. It is as though he operates on his own perfect internal calendar. Lars’ internal calendar is an unending hourglass to drown in. He does not know how he will be able to carry Steven when Garnet leaves them.

The world has forgotten them, Rose, the gems, but they are not lonely. Lars accepts it as a natural evolution of history, but Steven still mourns the loss, worried about the memories of a planet that’s already forgotten all he has done for it.

“Hey, Steven?” Lars asks, when they are alone. “I’ll die too, right? I’ll die and be with all of you?”

Pearl said all things die, but Lars is so terrified she was wrong, wakes up screaming from nightmares where he is the sole survivor of the heat death of the universe. It is pure pain.

“Of course you will, Lars.” Steven reassures him, voice raspy with age. “You’re already getting grey hairs, see?” Steven plucks a hair and hands it to him.

It is pink and pure and perfect, unchanged, but Lars smiles anyways. He knows it’s a lie, but it is the only thing he has to hold onto.

On the scoreboard that exists only in his mind, Lars changes the zero under Steven’s name to one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I was gonna wait until tomorrow to finish this but then decided that I don't need to live by such arbitrary rules of time. Anyways, this is it! Steven's lie to Lars. 
> 
> As cliche as it might be, the story of 'immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be' it is a trope I enjoy, and that felt appropriate, in this story Lars has become tired and scared of his immortality. I think it's a fairly universal fear of being alone and left behind. Lars doesn't fear death anymore, but fears life instead, a life where he alone is living without anyone who loves or cares for him. 
> 
> These were fun to write, since I don't do present tense often, and the constraint of short form stories between 100-500 words was a welcome challenge. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to write one of these 5 + 1 style fics and now here it is! I couldn't get this out of my head and had to write it down, even if they aren't the best. Posted in six chapters purely for stylistic reasons. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, leave a comment if you like!


End file.
